Earlier this year, there was talk of Seattle police horses being retired because of budget woes. But quick efforts from the Seattle Police Foundation and private donors helped saved Seattle's equinest.

That wasn't the first time a Seattle police horse had been spared at the last minute, though the previous case had a more serious fate looming.

In 1926, Seattle police had 14 officers on horseback. One of the horses was Prince, a light brown horse with a white streak down his muzzle. Early that year, the top brass determined Prince was too old for the job and sent him to retirement.

He didn't get a pension, but a local farmer agreed to take him. The mayor and city councilmen went to say goodbye and posed for pictures with Prince. The farmer said the beloved horse would go a large meadow and roam in the green space forever.

It was a big ceremony, but six months later Prince was nearly forgotten.

Back in the 1920s, Woodland Park – not yet divided by Aurora Avenue – fed carnivorous animals horse meat and the zookeepers slaughtered the horses on site. People at the zoo could visit the horses shortly before their end in a little grassy enclosure.

P-I reporter Frank Lynch and at least one other happened by there one day and noticed what he called "several knotty-legged, sway-backed plow horses" waiting for slaughter.

And there, unaware, was Prince.

"We hurried to the nearest telephone," Lynch wrote in 1954, in an article recalling the previous details. "They say that nothing like it ever happened at the P-I city room until the first word of the Lindbergh kidnapping came over the wires some years later."

A reporter rushed to the zoo in a taxi and took at least a dozen pictures of Prince. He also photographed the lions for whom Prince would soon be supper. They prodded the lions until they got one to roar.

That photo ran in the P-I, next to a picture of the beloved horse. The article recalled Prince's service to the city, Lynch recalled. City leaders were notified.

The headline: "Faithful Prince To Be Fed To The Lions!"

The P-I was flooded with letters and phone calls. Count DuBarry, who owned a piano store on First Avenue, took out a full page ad.

"IF ONE DROP OF THESE PONY'S BLOOD IS SHED," he wrote, "I SHALL MOVE MY PIANO STORE TO PORTLAND."

Prince was saved, as were the other horses.

And members of the park board were so ashamed, Lynch wrote, "the lions dined on beef for the next eight years."